increased proposal success: connecting with the “known”...appropriate frames will help your...

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“Salience” means making a piece of information more noticeable, meaningful, or

memorable.(Entman, 1993, p. 54)

nlike the cosmopolitan Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York,

Truman spoke comfortably before the National Plowing Match in Dex-

ter, Iowa. There, he told the audience that as a youth, he enjoyed “a reputation of being able to sow a 160-acre wheat field without a skipped placing showing in it” (Neal, 2003). Plainly, Truman’s knowledge of the finer subtleties of plowing established him as both genuine and accessible. He succeeded in activating the “frames” of farming and country life embed-ded deeply within the minds of America’s ru-ral population. By doing so, he adroitly aligned himself and his political platform with the vot-ers in the heartland of this country.

In the late 1940s, nearly 40 percent of the US population still lived in rural areas. And more than 10 percent were directly engaged in farming. By 1990, how-ever, only two percent of America’s population was involved directly in farming, and the over-all rural population had fallen to about 20 per-cent. Truman’s political framing would not have worked 40 years later.

That Truman was successful in having voters, in turn, align their sentiments (read: mental pictures, or frames) with him is borne out in his stunning and completely unexpect-ed victory over Dewey. This despite the head-

line that screamed from the front page of the prestigious Chicago Daily Tribune—“DEW-EY DEFEATS TRUmAN”—the morning af-ter the election.

thE POwEr OF FrAmingSignificantly, framing activates exist-

ing beliefs and thoughts, rather than adding something new to an individual’s beliefs about a given issue (Nelson, Oxley and Clawson 1997, 236). It is helpful to present the story in a vessel familiar to most listeners (Ibarra and Lineback 2005, 70). Harry Truman, for exam-ple, built on well-worn mental tracks to con-nect his political platform with the thoughts and sentiments of America’s voting popula-tion in 1948. He chose to frame his stories around the familiar tools and longstand-

ing lore of agriculture rather than “something new” for that era, such as television technol-ogy and programming. In fact, in 1948 only 1 in 10 Americans had even seen a television set!

Frames exert their distinctive power through the selective de-scription and omission of features of a situ-ation (Entman 1993, 54; see also Hallahan 1999, 207). As shown in Figure 1, selecting appropriate frames will help your customer resonate with your solution.

Increased Proposal Success: Connecting with the “Known”

• Why try to introduce the British ITIL quality standard for managing IT services to a customer who is already familiar with and using ISO 9001:2000 standards?

• Why propose a Project Manager (PM), Deputy Project Manager, and three Task Lead-ers to manage a project on which the customer is used to interacting with one “work-ing” PM and two “working” Task Leaders.

• Why offer a monthly, paper-based performance satisfaction assessment program to a customer who is reticent to complete automated performance assessments on an an-nual basis?

• Why introduce a 6-company team to perform on a program that has been awarded historically to a contractor that offers a streamlined, two-vendor solution?

• Why design and build your proposal documents in a manner that does not adhere to the structure, nomenclature, and sequence provided in Sections L, M, and C of the government’s final Request for Proposal (RFP)—an RFP that the government spent months developing and reviewing?

• Why frame the benefits of your organization’s solution in terms of exacting schedule control when increased return on investment (ROI) and decreased total cost of own-ership (TCO) are the critical customer success factors?

��ProposalManagement O

One of the key questions that a company must ask when pursuing a bid opportunity to provide services, products, or knowledge sets to the U.S. federal government is, “Who must we be to win?” Initially, this question might appear confusing. So let us unravel it to see why it is so important.

There are many facets that make up the overall image of your company. Representa-tive facets might include:

• Small business• Minority-owned business• Woman-owned business• Financially stable firm• Mission support contractor• Performance-based support contractor• Proven prime contractor• Core competency in information tech-

nology • Core competency in engineering• Core competency in telecommunica-

tions support• Core competency in scientific support• ISO 9001:2000-certified organization• Established defense contractor• Known NASA contractor• Documented cyber security provider• Employee-focused culture.

For a given bid opportunity, emphasizing (that is, “giving salience,” academically speak-ing) your organization’s woman-owned busi-ness status and core competency in telecom-munications support may well be the ideal picture you want to paint. On another bid opportunity, your firm’s financial stability, core competency in engineering, and being a known NASA contractor may constitute the image that you want to frame, and then project to your customer at multiple points and in multiple ways (e.g., narrative, graph-ics, cover art) throughout your proposal.

Note that the majority of the descriptive elements that comprise your organization’s overall image are not employed when answer-ing the question, “Who must we be to win?” Most are, in fact, omitted. Deciding what in-formation to present (inclusion), what points to emphasize (salience), and what informa-tion to omit (exclusion) is a critical process in framing exactly what image of your company you want to project to your customer (see Figure 2).

One other important step must be accom-plished at this juncture as well. It is critical to

Figure 1. Selecting the right frame to tell and sell your story.

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A frame offers perspective by managing the alignment

of the observer (read: federal government evaluator) in relation

to an issue (read: your company’s image or your

proposed solution set).

alter the weight or im-portance value of par-ticular elements. In the example above where your firm’s financial sta-bility, core competency in engineering, and be-ing a known NASA con-tractor were the key ele-ments in the image that you want to frame and project to your custom-er, it is also important to weight one element as the most vital. It may be financial stability, given validated marketing intelligence that your Business Development staff uncovered which indicates the current incumbent con-tractor’s difficulty in meeting payroll during contract startup or its inability to offer pre-paid educational and training benefits to it employees. Frames lend additional weight to an already accessible concept by influencing its perceived relevance or importance (Nel-son, Oxley, and Clawson 1997, 236-237).

To frame, therefore, is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text in such a way as to pro-mote a particular prob-lem definition, causal interpretation, and/or recommendation for the item described (Entman 1993, 52). The same cer-tainly applies to graph-ics as well.

A frame offers perspective by managing the alignment of the observer (read: federal government evaluator) in relation to an is-sue (read: your company’s image or your proposed solution set). In addition, a frame directs the observer to focus on a feature of an issue within the frame, and then to disre-gard other features of the same issue that fall outside the frame. Finally, a frame influences subsequent judgment in that it organizes and tailors information to fit into it. It therefore not only contains, but also constrains (Venter 2004).

Figure 2. Framing participates in the process of sensemaking for government evaluators.


Framing is conceptually connected to the

underlying psychological processes that people use to examine information, to make judgments, and to

draw inferences.

In his ballad “Against the Wind,” guitar-ist Bob Seeger sang about “What to leave in, what to leave out.” These song lyrics are directly analogous to framing as it relates to proposals. We as proposal professionals have to make very conscious choices about what to leave in—that is, include within the frames that we present to the government—and what to leave out.

grAsPing thE highLights OF FrAming thEOry

Solid academic research and real-world applications provide the foundational un-derpinnings for framing theory and practice. Framing theory has been applied extensively in the areas of political analysis, broadcast journalism, news re-porting, public opinion, advertising, and com-munications (Scheufele 1999, 104). Amos Tver-sky and Daniel Kahn-emann should be seen as the founders of framing theory.

Contrary to the central concept of “ratio-nal choice theory,” where people always strive to make the most rational choices possible, framing theory suggests that how something is presented (i.e., “the frame”) influences the choices people make (www.valuebasedma-nagement.net/methods_tversky_framing.html).

Framing is a process distinct from tradi-tional persuasion via belief change (Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson 1997, 235). It is concep-tually connected to the underlying psycho-logical processes that people use to examine information, to make judgments, and to draw inferences (Hallahan 1999, 206). Framing is grounded in “prospect theory,” which inte-grates the psychology of decision evaluations

with the economic the-ory of customer choice. Prospect theory argues that people evaluate purchases in terms of gains or losses, rela-tive to a reference point (Smith and Nagle 1995, 99-100).

In addition, the cognitive consistency theory in psychology explains that a person is

more likely to accept new claims if they are shown to be similar to already accepted ideas and practices. Advocates (read: proposal pro-fessionals) must attempt to construct frames that resonate with the broader understand-ing of customers (Payne 2001, 10).

Finally, framing theory asserts that the way in which we receive information—indeed, how the story is told, begins to structure how we view what has transpired (Hayden 2003, 5). At its core, frame analysis is the study of how events in everyday life are organized or made sense of in coherent ways. “We react to things in the world based on the informa-tion coming to us through frames” (Stout and Buddenbaum 2003, 1). In effect, framing participates in the process of sensemaking, as shown in Figure 2 (Hayden 2003, 6).


How we look at things matters.

FrAming, PhOtOgrAPhy, And PrOPOsALing

Frames refer to lenses that stakeholders (read: government evaluators) use to make sense of the information (Gray 2004, 167). These lenses can be applied selectively to frame customer requirements in such a way as to align with your company’s solution sets, as shown in Figure 3. For example, your custom-er’s (in this example, the Department of En-ergy) requirements as presented in the State-ment of Work (SOW) of the RFP or Statement of Objectives (SOO) in the RFS, may focus on Tier 1 and Tier 2 help desk support.

Your company may elect to frame your so-lution strictly in terms of help desk solutions and Tivoli, Citrix, Con-trol-F1, and Applix com-mercial-off-the-shelf products. Alternatively, you might frame the customer’s requirement in terms of enterprise-wide information cyber security governance,

management, and architecture in accordance with the Federal Information Security Man-agement Act. Finally, your company might expand the ramifications of the basic task- and project-level help desk requirements to frame the ultimate requirement as helping the customer agency get to “green” on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Exhibit 300s.

The Exhibit 300s constitute part of the Executive Branch Management Scorecard to track how well federal departments and agencies are executing the five President’s Management Agenda (PMA) components. Precisely how you elect to frame the Depart-ment of Energy’s requirements will depend upon the marketing intelligence that you col-

lect and validate. But, as illustrated in Figure 3, a very different pic-ture emerges depend-ing upon the lens you choose to use. Any event (or in this case, the solu-

tion) can be framed in multiple ways (Chyi and McCombs 2004, 30).

Figure 3. Frame the same requirement in different ways to align your solution set and corpo-rate strengths with your customer’s vision.


PiCturEs, mAPs, And stOriEs

American journalist and political com-mentator Walter Lippmann, who wrote the influential book Public Opinion in 1922, as-serted that people act based on “the pictures inside our heads” rather than on objective reality (Hallahan 1999, 206). George Lakoff writes that we understand words on the basis of a “mental map” (Miller 2005, 205). In gen-eral, people create stories to organize their experiences, create order, gain perspectives, and make evaluations (Escalas 2004, 168).

Pictures. Maps. Stories. A long way from logic, analysis, objectivity, metrics, and fact. Yet Stephen Denning, former World Bank knowledge manage-ment executive, says that “analysis might excite the mind, but it hardly offers a route to the heart.” (Anonymous 2004, 7). The World

Advertising Research Center finds that sto-rytelling injects emotional value, thereby in-creasing the perceived value of the product (or proposal solution) and making it more attractive to buy or select as part of the com-petitive bid process (Fonnesbaek and Ander-son 2005, 33).

Stories work because they are engag-ing, easy to remember, and non-adversarial (Anonymous 2004, 7). Stories function as bridges, reaching across boundaries of cul-ture, profession, and age (Hale 2004, 50; Har-ris and Barnes 2005, 7). Dr. Deborah Sole of Harvard University asserts that stories can convey one’s trust-worthiness, as well as sig-nal one’s trust in others (Sole 2002). Story-telling makes experience visible (Johansson

2004, 341). Importantly, all good stories have a basic and necessary characteristic, namely coherence, as illustrated in Figure 4 (Ibarra and Lineback 2005, 68).

Perception is reality.–John Van Maanen, 1973

Figure 4. Aligning your proposal story with pre-existing customer frames of reference.


APPLying FrAming tO yOur PrOPOsALs

So you are working on your next com-petitive proposal to provide support services for one of the major civilian agencies of the federal government. With the direction pro-vided in the PMA, you already know that this contract you are pursuing must focus on meaningful and measurable results. In addi-tion, the PMA also tells you that this civilian agency—like all other federal agencies—must align its performance and business/financial processes.

Given this critical background informa-tion coupled with the project- and custom-er-specific marketing intelligence that your company has collected through business devel-opment activities and customer relationship management over the past six months, you might frame your man-agement solution to include processes and tools that track, docu-ment, and provide near-real-time insight into project performance. Furthermore, you might convey the strengths of your proposed key personnel in your staffing section through the “frame” of staff professionals committed to and experienced with performance-based contracts, and meeting the metrics associ-ated with Service Level Agreements and Ser-vice Level Objectives. Your past performance volume or section might be framed to high-light performance-based contracts and ser-vice delivery models of operation. Addition-ally, your technical volume or section might include discrete subsections that focus on or, in effect, frame your solution set in terms of

embracing metrics across the scope of the contractual work to be performed. “A frame is a central organizing idea for making sense of relevant events and suggesting what is at is-sue” (Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson 1997, 222). Given this fact, your proposal can frame ev-ery aspect of your solution set for this civilian agency in terms of meaningful and measur-able results.

By taking this approach, you are empha-sizing specific aspects of your solution, pre-senting particular information and omitting other information, and aligning your solution with your civilian agency customer’s pre-

existing vision (PMA, p e r fo r m a n ce - b a s e d contracting) as shown in Figures 2 and 4. It is important to note that page count restrictions contained in RFPs are not the primary drivers of what information to include or omit in your proposal. Rather, your solution and the frames in which that solution is constructed should drive these decisions.

rEFErEnCEsAnonymous. “Why Denning is Nuts

about Stories.” New Zealand Management (September 2004): 6-7.

Chyi, H.I. and M. McCombs. “Media Sa-lience and the Process of Framing: Coverage of the Columbine School Shootings.” Jour-nalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 81 (spring 2004): 22-35.

Entman, R.M. “Framing: Toward Clarifi-cation of a Fractured Paradigm.” Journal of Communication, 43 (1993): 51-57.

Escalas, J.E. “Narrative Processing: Build-ing Consumer Connections to Brands. Jour-nal of Consumer Psychology, 14 (2004): 168-180.

Fonnesbaek, J. and M.M. Anderson. “Sto-ry Telling: How LEGO Told a Story and Sold a Toy. Young Consumers (2005, Quarter 2): 31-39. (World Advertising Research Center [WARC]).

Inspiration for this article came from Seth Godin’s recent book, All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World.

Frames offer proposal professionals a powerful tool for aligning proposalsolutions with customers’ pre-existing sentiments and mental pictures. Try

applying them on your next proposal. They work. That’s

my story and I’msticking to it!


Godin, S. All marketers are liars: The pow-er of telling authentic stories in a low-trust world. New York: Portfolio, 2005.

Gray, B. “Strong Opposition: Frame-based Resistance to Collaboration.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 14 (2004): 166-176.

Hale, C.R. “The Sales Power of Storytell-ing.” Advisor Today, 50 (July 2005): 52.

Hallahan, K. “Seven Models of Framing: Implications for Public Relations.” Journal of Public Relations Research, 11 (1999): 205-242.

Harris, J. and B.K. Barnes. “Leadership Storytelling.” Leadership Excellence, 22 (April 2005): 6-7.

Hayden, C.A. “Power in Media Frames: Thinking about Strategic Framing and Me-dia System Dependency and the Events of September 11, 2001. (2003). Retrieved from http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/SubmittedDocuments/archivedpapers/Fall2003/pdf_files/PowerinMediaFramesby-Hayden.pdf

Ibarra, H. and K. Lineback. “What’s Your Story?” Harvard Business Review, 83 (Janu-ary 2005): 64-71.

Johansson, A.W. “Consulting as Story-Making.” The Journal of Management Devel-opment, 23 (2004): 339-354.

Neal, S., ed. Miracle of ’48: Major speeches and selected whistle remarks of 1948. Car-bondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.

Robert S. Frey is the Senior Vice President of Knowledge Management and Proposal Development for RS Information Systems, Inc. (RSIS®). Mr. Frey has published four edi-tions of a well-received book on proposal development for small businesses entitled, Suc-cessful Proposal Strategies for Small Businesses: Using Knowledge Management to Win Government, Private-Sector, and International Contracts (Boston and London: Artech House, 2005). The Fourth Edition of this volume, which was reviewed at USATODAY.com on 6/27/05, is available through www.amazon.com or www.artech-house.com. In addition, Mr. Frey teaches proposal development and knowledge management at UCLA in West-wood, California, as an Adjunct Professor. He is a regular contributor of business and pro-posal-related articles to Corporate Corridors magazine, Minorities and Women in Business (MWIB) magazine, and the Kansas City Small Business Monthly. Mr. Frey holds a Master of Science in Management (MSM) degree with a focus in Marketing from the University of Maryland, as well as a Master of Arts degree in History.

Nelson, T.E., Z.M. Oxley, and R.A. Claw-son. “Toward a Psychology of Framing Ef-fects.” Political Behavior, 19 (1997): 221-246.

Payne, R.A. “Persuasion, Frames, and Norm Construction.” European Journal of International Relations, 7 (2001): 37-61. Re-trieved from http://www.louisville.edu/a-s/polsci/payne/REVFRAME.doc

Scheufele, D.A. “Framing as a Theory of Media Effects.” Journal of Communication, 49 (winter 1999): 103-122.

Smith, G.E. and T.T. Nagle. “Frames of Reference and Buyers’ Perception of Price and Value.” California Management Review, 38 (fall 1995): 98-116.

Sole, D. “Sharing Knowledge Through Storytelling.” Learning Innovations Labora-tories, Harvard University Graduate School of Education. (April 2002). Retrived from http://www.providersedge.com/docs/km_articles/Sharing_Knowledge_Through_Sto-rytelling.pdf

Stout, D.A. and J.M. Buddenbaum. “Me-dia, Religion, and ‘Framing.’” Journal of Me-dia and Religion, 2 (2003): 1-3.

Venter, D. “Framing—An Important Ne-gotiation Tool.” The Negotiator Magazine. (October 2004). Retrieved from http://www.negotiatormagazine.com/article224_1.html